The False Narrative of Good and Evil with ChatGPT

The New York Times published another article on ChatGPT today. This one is a well-research piece by Kalley Huang who interviewed professors, students, and administrators to learn about higher education's response to ChatGPT. 

Huang's reporting confirms a lot of what I've been hearing in the discussions I'm being pulled into as a Writing Program Administrator. 

But there is an issue with how the larger story is developing, and Huang's piece demonstrates that issue.

I posted the following comment: 

Higher education is being framed as a form of policing in this article, and that is deeply frustrating. 

The question not asked in this reporting is important for context. How has the lumbering behemoth of higher education marshaled a response to this disruptive Silicon Valley technology within two months of ChatGPT's launch? 

The answer is simple. The responses to this disruption are all well-established practices developed by scholars of Composition & Rhetoric (a discipline that, among other things, studies the development of writing ability in college settings).

Here are the "innovations" described in this article: Mr. Aumann will support his student's writing by including low-stakes in-class writing exercises that build towards the more significant assignment. Professors are going to develop more collaborative writing assignments. Assignments include reflection and revision memos. "Gone are prompts like 'write five pages about this or that.'” Professors will look beyond the canon for assignment prompts. Writing instructors will teach students about the benefits and pitfalls of new writing technologies. Institutions are going to revisit their academic integrity policies. 

That list describes the basics required to teach writing. It is not a response to attempts to cheat. We Compositionists are not plagiarism police. Our job is to teach students why writing their own paper is more valuable than submitting an "A paper."

I get pointed questions about student cheating all the time, especially when I work with people to make changes in higher education writing settings. People love to imagine ways students will cheat. 

And yeah, I can name a number of times I have identified papers or passages that were lifted from other sources. I'm not here to say it's a non-issue.

But I am here to say that the public likes to think of things using established narratives, and the following narratives are very popular:

• Cheating students outwit professors
• Professors catch cheating students

From School Library

These are stories we like to tell. And because these stories do happen from time to time, they become the stories we tell most often. News articles, department meetings, conference presentations, blog posts, op-eds in the Chronicle of Higher Education (so often), Tiktoks, Tweet threads, family gatherings, professional small talk sessions, everywhere we look!

And if you have a good plagiarism story, people lean in to listen. You get rewarded with engagement. 

The most common one I used to hear was about students who figured out ways to outwit Turnitin.com. People love those tales.

And I am very much aware of this happening again with ChatGPT. 

I would like to remind everyone of this 9-year-old gem from Neil deGrasse Tyson:

When Students cheat on exams it's because our School System values grades more than Students value learning.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) April 14, 2013

We must re-examine our practices if our students don't understand why we are teaching the very challenging processes of writing to learn and writing to contribute to a community.

If we don't teach students the value of doing their own writing, our course is nothing more than a hoop to jump through... Or worse, a gate intended to withhold opportunity from some in favor of others.